Guardian Live online event: Stewart Lee interview

The 3rd of October Stewart Lee interviewed Moore, in a the Guardian Live online event, on his upcoming Illuminations book. Now the whole video is available on YouTube, HERE.

In their email to the event subscribers the Guardian Live staff writes:

We have also included below a reading list of writers and works mentioned by Alan and Stewart during the discussion. [...] 

Reading List

Alan and Stewart talked about several different writers who had influenced Alan's work - and a few of you have asked for a reading list. Here are some of the authors and books they discussed...

• When talking about the story "Illuminations," Stewart referenced Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury - a story about lost childhood. The character in Moore's story finds a copy of The Silver Locusts by Bradbury in a junk shop. 
• When they spoke about Moore's story "The Improbably Conscious High-Energy State", Stewart compared Moore's experimental writing to Italo Calvino.
• When talking about the story "American Light: An Appreciation" Stewart said it read like an affectionate parody of 50s-60s beat poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Alan Ginsberg. Alan is a subscriber to Kevin Ring's Beat Scene magazine. 
• When talking about the first story, "Hypothetical Lizard", Stewart said he was reminded of the grotesque fantasy world of Clark Ashton Smith's novels. He also referenced the illustrations of Barry Windsor-Smith - particularly for Conan: Red Nails. 
• When talking about Northampton in Alan's work, Stewart referred to A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre. They both talked about Steve Aylett, in particular LINT, which contains what Stewart called a similar "collision of words that ought not to go together" - and Stewart recommended another title by Aylett, Hyperthick.
• Alan said the first of his new Long London series, The Great When - is influenced by Arthur Machen's writing, set in London - particularly his novel The Green Round and the short story, "N".  
• Alan talked about writing about specific places - in his case Northampton and London - and referred to William Hope Hodgson's novel The House on the Borderland, which was inspired by Hodgson seeing a house balanced precariously at the top of a clifftop chasm in Galway. In the 60s Iris Murdoch wrote The Unicorn after visiting the same place - both novels were similarly about a recluse threatened by supernatural visitations from below. 
• When asked what he'd recommend for a 10 year old boy to read, Alan recommended Alan Garner - in particular his latest book, Treacle Walker. He also read Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost at the age of 10.
• When asked his favourite ghost story, Alan picked Lost Hearts by MR James. He also praised the ghost stories of Robert Aickman. 

You can watch the whole video HERE.

More HERE at Bleedingcool too. 

Gormenghast, Internet and enlightening people

Excerpts from a Guardian interview published today. The complete article is available here. 

Alan Moore: "[The Gormenghast novels] were probably the first books where I began to understand just what you could do with writing: how he could conjure this entire complex environment and these almost fluorescent characters that stayed in your mind for ever”.

[...] "When the internet first became a thing," he says, "I made the decision that this doesn’t sound like anything that I need. I had a feeling that there might be another shoe to drop – and regarding this technology, as it turned out, there was an Imelda Marcos wardrobe full of shoes to drop. I felt that if society was going to morph into a massive social experiment, then it might be a good idea if there was somebody outside the petri dish." He makes do, instead, with an internet-savvy assistant: "He can bring me pornography, cute pictures of cats and abusive messages from people."

[...] "I’m probably a pretty much unreconstructed member of the psychedelic left from 1970, where the agenda was just: let’s drop LSD in the reservoirs and thus enlighten everybody. Luckily, before I could implement that, I did grow the fuck up and realise [it] would be a terrible idea. But nevertheless the idea of enlightening people as a way of changing society probably remained my strongest directive."

You can read the complete article here.

About Ideas

Excerpt from a really interesting interview published in 2018 on InsideTheRift.net.

The complete interview is available HERE.

Prox: [...] could you tell us about some ideas and themes you have been wanting to explore throughout your career that you haven’t been able to yet?

Alan Moore: [...] As to any ideas that I haven’t had a chance to express yet…no, that isn’t really how it works, or at least not for me. That seems to imply that creators are somehow female in their mental biology, and that ideas are like ova: one is born with all the eggs or ideas that one will ever deploy, and you’d best hope that you live long enough to realise them all. In reality, this isn’t the process. While odd fragments – a character’s name here, a brief scene there – might linger in the mind and be useful as material for some new endeavour, in practice it will always be the ideas that are newest and freshest to you that will provide the energy and inspiration for your best work. This plays into a common assumption that people often make about the act of writing: they assume, not unreasonably, that a writer will first have an idea, and then they will write it down. What actually happens is that most ideas are engendered, mysteriously, in the act of writing itself. So, no, any ideas that I’ve had that were worthwhile have been taken care of somewhere in my extensive bibliography. Sooner or later a new idea will slowly coalesce and will be immediately incorporated into whatever seems to be the most suitable vehicle at that time. I’ve recently considered, for example, that it might be interesting to engage more seriously with poetry, although the content of that poetry is something that I’ll only recognise when I’m actually sitting down with the intention of writing a poem. Premeditated ideas that have been idling around the brain for years will probably turn out to be stale and useless. After all, if they’d really been that good, how would you have been able to resist using them sooner?

Complete interview HERE.

Glowing Moore by Renato Quiroga

Art by Renato Quiroga

Above, a radiant Alan Moore portrait by artist Renato Quiroga.

Quiroga is a graphic artist focused on digital color, lettering and editorial design for comic books.

For more info about the artist: Official site - Flickr

Mesmerising Moore

Art by Daniele Caluri

Above, a mesmerising pencil portrait of our Writer from Northampton by Italian comic book artist and creator DANIELE CALURI. Stunning pencils!

For more info about the artist: Official site - Wikipedia - Feltrinelli page - CART Gallery (in Italian)

Doc Manhattan by Michele Benevento

Art by Michele Benevento

Above, an inspired Doc Manhattan by Italian comic book artist Michele Benevento. 

Peter Bagge on the Kool-Aid Man

Excerpt from Other Stuff published by Fantagraphics in 2013.

Peter Bagge on his Kool-Aid collaboration with Alan Moore.

"The Hasty Smear of My Smile...": Comics writer Alan Moore would frequently tell me he wanted to do a strip about the Kool-Aid mascot as far back as the late 1980s. He had no idea what it would be about or why it needed to be done. He just knew if had to be done, and that I had to draw it. His living in UK (where Kool-Aid wasn't available), and his intentional lack of access to the internet meant I had to do the research for him -- made easy by my discovering of a plain text website accurately entitled "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Kool-Aid Man." So I printed it out and then faxed (remember faxing?!?) him all 50 pages. This strip was the result, along with a huge overseas fax/phone bill. 

Halo Jones by David Hitchcock

Art by David Hitchcock

Above, a fantastic illustration featuring Halo Jones, General Luiz Cannibal and cyber-canine Toby by British comic book artist DAVID HITCHCOCK. 

For more info about Hitchcock: blog - Facebook page

Cobweb by Eric Shonborn

Art by Eric Shonborn 

Above, a gorgeous Cobweb (from the ABC line) by "illustrator/graphic designer/cartoonist by night" Eric Shonborn.

For more info about the artist, visit his official site HERE.

Alan Moore presents... Illuminations

A few minutes ago Waterstones published a short Alan Moore video presenting his upcoming Illuminations book. The complete video is available HERE.

Alan Moore: With prose fiction, you are able to create the finished work right there and then. [...] The words that you type up on the page, that is the finished work.

It's incredibly liberating to just be me and a keyboard, to not have to consider anything else.

[...] there is an awful lot to be said for just having it as one person and their mind and an empty sheet of paper.

That is probably the ultimate thrill of writing. [...]

Watch the whole video HERE.

Neil Gaiman on Illuminations

Illuminations is a wonderful collection, brilliant and often moving. A few are stories I've loved for years (in one case, for decades), some were new to me, often managing to be both mind-expanding and cosmic while utterly rooted in our urban reality, written in language that coruscates, concatenates and glitters. But the short stories in this book also turn out to be a sort of camouflage, or a frame, for 'What We Can Know About Thunderman,' a short novel that's a scabrous, monstrous, often hilarious, unmasking and reinvention of the people who made the comics, and the lives destroyed by the four colour funnies. It's Alan Moore's Guernica, a time-hopping ontological Imaginary Story that refuses to leave your head after you've read it. - Neil Gaiman

Regular edition - Limited edition